Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I thought I’d share a few interesting notes on the progress of my Speakeasy DSL upgrade. First, Speakeasy is doing an impressive thing where every day they send me an email with the current status of my order. This email has a set of checked off steps, but it also have the complete details of every communication between Speakeasy (ISP), Covad (DSL line provider), and Qwest (line infrastructure). Its an interesting way to approach the issue of having three vendors that don’t always see eye to eye. Speakeasy is still the main touch point with the customer, so even if they can’t always control their vendors, they can at least provide full visibility of what is going on. I’m impressed.

Also, they emailed me today to double check on the install date to make sure that I’ll be home. It turns out I need to take care of some aircraft maintenance that day so I asked to reschedule. They said that the next install date was 2 weeks out, but hey, can you do this Friday? Again, very impressive, both that they made sure they were in touch, and also that they did it through email (which is by far my preferred mode of communication).

A bit later I was wondering if they were going to have time to ship me the DSL-modem. I was about to email the guy back when I got my daily status update and I see from the notes in it that they realized the issue and are going to make sure that the guy who comes out Friday brings one with him. So far today Speakeasy is 3 for 3…

Several sites reported last week that Intel plans to ship Penryn, the 45nm technology CPUs November 12th. Initially they will ship the high end chips and some of the server ones which should be fine for me. Hopefully I’ll be building my new workstation just about for Thanksgiving although there is one potential glitch. My assumption is that I’m going to hold out for DDR3 memory which should add about 10-20% to system performance once you get the faster DDR3 parts. The problem is that right now it is astronomically expensive- close to $200/gb (compared to $70/gb for decent DDR2 memory). Since I want 4GB I really don’t want to pay $800 for the memory.

My hope is that the prices are so bad right now since there are only one or two motherboards that can actually take it. Once the X38 chipsets ship in a week or two there should be a lot more DDR3 capable boards on the market and I’m hoping the prices will be down to $100-$120/gb by the time I’m ready to buy.

Two new albums have come out recently that I’m really enjoying. The first is from Black Francis who apparently has gone back to his Pixies era name along with quite a bit of its sound on his new album Bluefinger. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the Pixies. Its not the same as any of the specific Pixies albums, but if you like them you will probably like it.

The other one is the self-titled debut album from A Place to Bury Strangers. Tons of noise and feedback and it certainly gets compared to the Jesus and Mary Chain for good reasons. Also reminds me of some of the Raveonettes stuff. But pretty cool and nice high energy. It can be an interesting trick to prevent the sound from becoming washed out with all that feedback but they manage it.